Bargaining
by IlonkaBackwoods
Summary: Sarah has no doubt about who has been haunting her with strange shadows. It would be a good idea to get in doubt, because Ludo's new friend has had a couple of extremely boring centuries. An epic quest, a romance and mortal peril guaranteed. J/S
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer, Author's note, and All the Necessary Warnings That Must Be Heeded:** _Sarah, Jareth, Ludo and all the other fantastic characters from the 1986 film belong to the Jim Henson company. Not mine, I'm just borrowing them and I promise to give them back clean and in good shape after I'm done with them. (Just kidding, I'm _so_ going to elope with Jareth...) Please don't sue or anything, the American ligitation system scares me. _

_I'm a total nebwie in the world of labfiction. I watched the movie a week ago because I had nothing else to do on a rainy night and it had David Bowie in it. Then I watched it again and then I made my little sisters watch it (according to them, it scarred them for life) and then I made my friends watch it so that I would have an excuse for watching it one more time before returning it to the library. After I was done with the movie, I read every piece of fanfiction that I could find about it and decided that there are some amazing writers out there. Actually, most of the labfics that I have read over the last week have managed to amaze me. Some of them were amazingly good, some of them were amazingly bad. Most of them were bad. It occurred to me that the labfiction universe was in a severe state of imbalance. So, out of the sheer goodness of my heart and out of respect towards Jareth's impossibly tight pants, I decided had to do something to help. So I started writing my own attempt at the genre. In English, which is not my native language. And without an editor/ a beta. You see where I'm going here?_

_So, while I'm not actually ashamed of what I've written so far, I have to warn you: _there are going to be some huge, ugly, stinky, grammatical slips! _And also _clichés, tropes and general cheesiness. _Which is ok if you like cheese, I suppose. I do. Enjoy!_

PROLOGUE

As the third unlucky light bulb ended its life with a joyful little pop that made the tips of her fingers tingle, Sarah had to admit that this was no coincidence. She almost cursed aloud. Almost. _Oh, he would _so _love __that_, now _wouldn't he... _She never cursed these days.

She left her now darkened bedroom and made her way to the bathroom. It was best to have this thing done and over with.

She touched another switch and another little light bulb burned out, merrily popping, and illuminated the small room briefly. The flash of light made the surrounding shadows seem even taller and darker. He was slowly getting to her, there was no denying it. It made her angry just to think about him and then the fact that she had let him make her angry made her even angrier.

_Sly bastard._

As she left the bathroom, she hit her toe on the the threshold and the sudden stab of pain made her eyes swell with tears.

_This isn't fair!_

She let herself fall on the floor and sat there for a while, back resting to the wall, tears of fatigue and anger running down her cheeks. She felt that tingle on her hands again and managed only barely to make it go away. It felt like holding back a sneeze of molten iron.

She would have to confront him soon and put an end to this, before all hell would break loose because of her faltering self discipline. She had the power. She knew she had it and she knew that he knew it too. She had defeated him in his own kingdom, he was no match for her here.

What game was he playing at this time?

_And why is he playing it with me?_

Sarah sighed wearily.

_No use wallowing in self-pity, _she decided and stood up. _Four down and nine to go._ These things always happened in thirteens.

As Sarah moved around the small apartment touching a switch here and there, shadows that weren't cast by her followed. And in the middle of the darkest shadows, someone with hair spun of starlight let out a little laugh that sounded like the chirping of crickets.


	2. Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

_wherein Ludo gets a new friend_

Sarah looked at the creature who she, in the lack of a better explanation to give to the neighbours, had started calling her dog.

"Ok, then," she said. "Let's see if you'll get it right this time, shall we."

Ludo flashed her a smile straight from the darkest nightmares of the whole American Dental Association and nodded enthusiastically.

"BARK."

"No, Ludo, you aren't supposed to _say_ it! Dogs don't _say_ things. It's an... exclamation. Try to sound a bit more spontaneous."

A blank stare.

"Surprised. Like you suddenly saw something that you were really scared of. Like a ghost!"

The beast smiled contently.

"LUDO LIKE GHOST. GHOST TASTE GOOD."

Sarah raised an eyebrow. Ludo went "hunting" every night and Sarah had never asked what it actually was that her friend hunted for. But she had always presumed that the beast would prefer something a bit more substantial. Like stray cats for instance, or maybe rocks. She considered asking how it was even possible to eat a ghost, but decided that maybe it was best not to know. Besides, she didn't want to spend the morning discussing ghosts. Her nights were full of them already.

"Look out, the Goblin King is right behind you and he is going to throw you into the Bog of Eternal Stench!

"BAAAARRRRK!"

Some plaster fell down from the ceiling and the big beast glared at her sulkily. Sarah couldn't help but giggle.

"Close enough, you might want to go easy on the volume, though. I think we are ready to go out now. Just remember not to walk too much on two feet. And please don't step into any puddles this time."

Ludo had been living with her since she had moved to the campus, almost for a year now. Unlike the other creatures from Underground that visited Sarah frequently, he seemed to have permanently settled to the Above world. Sarah didn't mind this at all. Admittedly, he wasn't the best person to have deep conversations with, but it was nice to have a friend around. Especially because, for certain reasons, she couldn't have possibly lived with a room mate. And a seven feet tall horned monster was probably the best guard dog there was.

The best guard dog there was stepped right into the biggest puddle there was and barked deafeningly. Sarah frowned as her face got splashed with muddy water.

"Ludo, you idiot! We talked about this two minutes ago! Even you can't be this slow..."

Ludo looked at her as if he had just been hit and his hurt expression made Sarah mentally slap herself. He took a few surprisingly fast steps that got him across the road, letting Sarah fall behind. She immediately felt ashamed of herself. Despite what she might have been telling the neighbours, Ludo wasn't her pet and it was not her place to tell him what to do or how to behave. So what if she was tired. So what if she was on a bad mood. She had been on a bad mood for almost two weeks now. It wasn't Ludo's fault. It wasn't her fault either, or so she told herself. She blamed it on the weather. And on the shadows.

The first days of May had been surprisingly sunny and hot for the first days of May, almost too hot to Sarah's liking. The heat that was so uncharacteristic for springtime made her remember the carefree summers of her childhood, and she couldn't help but thinking how those times were now irreversibly over. There were going to be no seaside or camping trips, or reading in bed till dawn. She would be spending her whole summer the grown-up way, working.

Sarah followed Ludo to the park and the sweetly reminiscent scent of warm sand and freshly mown lawn left her a bit chocked up with nostalgia. It was a beautiful morning. Sky was covered in gossamer thin clouds that glowed golden in the morning light and under a giant fir tree there was a group of fairies that only she, Ludo and two passing children were able to see. Grass was still wet with last night's rain.

Sarah used her sleeve to wipe a bench dry and sat there wearily as Ludo disappeared under the fir tree to get better acquainted with the fairies. She could hear crickets chirping in the distance. Only a small goblin that was apparently writing something obscene on the concrete gate disturbed the harmony of the place.

She closed her eyes and let the morning sun caress her tired face. She had had another sleepless night.

As if to balance off the warmth of the days, it had stormed every single night for the past two weeks. Just when the evening shadows were getting longer and the heat started to be intolerable, the rain would come pouring down. The rain was always accompanied with roaring of thunder and a splendid show of lightning that made the long shadows live.

Literally.

The small goblin decided that perhaps prose wasn't its strongest medium of self-expression and moved on to visual arts. Sarah watched, full of horrified amusement, as the nasty little creature started drawing something that she imagined might have been a Goblin equivalent of a pin-up. It greatly resembled the Venus of Willendorf.

Sarah's visit to the Underground four years ago had been a very educating experience. It had opened her eyes to many things, small and big, trivial and vitally important alike. It had made her understand that maybe her baby brother wasn't all that bad after all, and that maybe, instead of dreaming of princes and fairy-tale balls, she could let that cute boy from her math class take her out to the new ice-cream bar. As long as he didn't try to order her anything peach-flavoured.

But above all, it had opened her eyes to the magic that surrounded her in everyday life, taking away the need to dwell in her fantasies. Magic was everywhere, it was real and as so many other people and creatures, she too possessed some of it. She was magical, just like the old apple tree standing next to her was magical. It hummed a beautiful melody to her ear every time she sat near it. The old lady who lived next door to her was magical. She kept ravens that were quite good conversationalists and had served Sarah perfectly fresh-tasting orange juice from the same twenty years old carton every time she went to visit her.

The shadows that had been haunting her lately were magical.

They were definitely magical.

Sarah was used to things that lurked in the shadows at night and she knew that mostly they were nothing to be scared of. There was a monster living under her bed, but just the thought of being scared of the grumpy old thing made her laugh. The scariest thing it was capable of was preying on her socks and complaining about her tendency to skip vacuuming under the bed. Usually the things that moved in the darkness were just goblins. Annoying, irritating, kitchen-plundering and boyfriend-repelling goblins that wouldn't leave her alone no matter what. Once the door to the Underground was open, there was no way to close it. And even if there was, the little creatures would probably just use some of their less lucky companions as a battering ram and break it down.

Not that she would have wanted them to go away, not permanently. Admittedly, mostly they were a real nuisance. They would steal every edible thing from her kitchen that wasn't placed in a locked container and make her furious by scaring off any friends that she invited to her place, but sometimes they were even kind of sweet. Sort of. For instance, they never forgot her birthday. Last year they had gotten her a blowpipe and a chicken to practice her aim on. She had hid the blowpipe but she kept the chicken in a cage in her living room, where it provided fresh eggs every now and then. She had named her Karen.

The small goblin had finished its vulgar masterpiece and smugly stuck out its tongue at Sarah before vanishing into the hedge.

Goblins weren't scary. Annoying, yes. Scary, no.

These shadows, or shades, or whatever the hell they were, really scared her. They weren't hiding in the dark, they seemed to be formed of the darkness itself. She didn't understand them. They always seemed to be out of her reach. First they were there, towering over her in a way that made her see nothing else, but the moment she tried to focus her gaze on them they vanished instantly, only to soon haunt her from the edge of her sight.

They scared her, but they also made her angry. The whole thing absolutely reeked of the Goblin King. She had no doubt that the shadows had been sent by him to haunt her, probably to spy on her too.

_Jareth, you sick old pervert. Are you stalking me now?_

And then there were the strange incidents that made her angry, made her lose control and showed that he knew her all too well.

A week ago, the cactus that Karen had bought her had changed into a rose bush overnight. There had been thirteen blood-red flowers in it. Five days ago a bowl of apples had turned into peaches. Three days ago a she had found a black snake in the fridge at work. And yesterday, during a lecture, a crystal "paperweight" had materialized on the professor's desk right in front of her eyes. She had gotten so upset about it that her lecture notes had spontaneously combusted. She could almost hear him snidely chuckling whenever some clearly magical accident made her loose her temper and add to the chaos with her own magic.

And then there was that damned owl. It had even been in the local news as a final lightening. The city-dwelling barn owl that had apparently made its nest on the roof of Sarah's building was now a local celebrity. That was so like him. _Show off._

No, you didn't have to be the Miss Marple of paranormal to figure out who was behind all this and what it was that he was trying to make her do. It was obvious that he was once again trying to get her to summon him. The only question was why.

Well, she was not going to play this game with him. She would not let him pull any reactions out of her any more. From now on, she was going to be level-headed, calm and sensible. Eventually he would have to stop.

Sarah yawned and stretched, closing her eyes again and let herself drift to light sleep. It was Saturday and work wouldn't start until afternoon. She didn't notice that up in the fir tree, a white barn owl watched her, never blinking, never turning its gaze.

***

Ludo had liked the fairies. They had been nice to him and played with him for a long time, teasing him by flying around so fast that it made him dizzy and occasionally some of them would allow him to catch them in his enormous paws. And he had met that pretty lady again, the one who visited at night and who had pretty hair and funny eyes and who the fairies loved. She had told Ludo wonderful stories about faraway places and she had made Ludo fly, just like he had flown in his dreams last night. She had made Ludo as small and light and glittering as a fairy and she had called Ludo her friend and promised to visit again tonight.

Ludo liked the pretty Lady. Pretty Lady was funny.

But now it was time to go home. Ludo watched his sleeping friend and sighed unhappily. Sarah wasn't as funny these days as she used to be. Sometimes she was even mean. Ludo knew she didn't sleep a lot and when she did, she didn't look like she was having happy dreams.

Maybe the pretty lady would give Sarah some happy dreams too, if Ludo asked nicely.

Ludo nudged Sarah's hand with his head and smiled nervously. He was relieved when Sarah smiled back and told him she was sorry she had been mean to him. They headed back home, side by side, and this time it was Sarah who jumped into the puddle, making Ludo roar with laughter as the water splashed around the two of them.

In the shadows under a large fir tree, a pair of ancient eyes gleamed with excitement. This was going to be fun! The small figure covered its brilliantly shining grey hair with a cloak of shadows and disappeared from the view of mortal eyes, turning into a shade.

***

A white barn owl landed near the hedgegrow, worked its way into the bushes and emerged from the other side as a white, lean cat with mismatched eyes. His Broadway-rank entrance and regal strut would have all gone to waste as unnoticed, if it hadn't been for Mr. Tickles. Mr. Tickles was, despite the name given by a previous pet human, a mature and worldly female cat who knew when she saw a fine-looking male. She tried to get the attention of the handsome stranger by flicking her tail seductively and was disappointed when the white cat just glanced at her arrogantly before turning away.

She soon forgot about the humiliation as a small human dropped its ice-cream cone on the pavement and she got herself a puddle of strawberry-flavoured cream to drown her sorrows in.

**AN: **_Please review, I'm an attention addict. Constructive criticism much approved. If you're interested in beta reading some of the future chapters, please let me know!_


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